Breaking Things Faster Than You Can Read About It

Plus: Where have all the Democrats gone?

Elon Musk, who reliable sources inform us is still not technically the president, wants to see reporters whose coverage he doesn’t like thrown in jail. “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” he posted last night. “They deserve a long prison sentence.” Happy Monday.

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A person holds an “I Am Stealing From You” Elon Musk poster at the U.S. Department of Education on February 14, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Jemal Countess / Getty Images for Progressive Change Institute.)

Everything Everywhere All at Once

by Andrew Egger

A few days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, my wife and I headed to the hospital for the birth of our third child, and I tried to clock out. Now I’m resurfacing like Rip Van Winkle—going to ground for a quick nap and waking in a brave new world. Everywhere you look, the landscape is changing—faster than we can write it down, faster than you can take it in. And they’re not even passing new laws yet!

The firings continue. Over the weekend, it was a brace of immigration judges,¹ hundreds of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration, hundreds more at DHS, an unknown number at the FDA. Trump’s goons are trying to get the Supreme Court to bless his firing of a government ethics watchdog. And as Bill discusses below, they’re also trying to hire back some nuclear safety workers they fired last week—hey, look, who knew they might be important?

That’s just one small part of the playbook, of course. The more aggressively Trump and Co. move without receiving real pushback from voters or elected Republicans, the bolder they seem to become to go still further. “He who saves his Country,” Trump posted on Saturday, “does not violate any Law.”

Did Trump pull out this perhaps-apocryphal quote from Napoleon Bonaparte on his own? Or was this one of his social-media lackeys operating for him? Dare we speculate which would be more alarming?

The White House is nearly done putting its pieces in place. Senate Republicans are waving through nominee after ludicrous nominee. The DOGE boys are worming their way into agency after agency. With the prologue stage of the Trump administration wrapping up, Trump’s laws do not constrain the People’s Emperor post feels like a thesis statement for what comes next.

Trump’s people sure seemed to take it that way. Elon Musk shared his post, festooning it with fourteen American flags. Republican congressmen fell all over themselves to laud it. “The President is Napoleon-posting and you’re blackpilling?” squealed Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), a member of both the Freedom Caucus and the House Oversight Committee. The shambling mummified corpse of conservative media scratched its head dumbfoundedly, then decided that if the president’s proclamation owned the libs, it must be good: “President sparks liberal meltdown for sharing controversial quote,” proclaimed the New York Post.

Meanwhile, Team Trump and conservative media continue to escalate their attacks on the federal judiciary, the one institution which—despite an extremely Trump-favorable 6–3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court—may still be poised to put a fly in the ointment on this, that, or the other Trump whim. “If ANY judge ANYWHERE can stop EVERY Presidential action EVERYWHERE, we do NOT live in a democracy,” Musk posted last week.

Everything moves faster and faster. So far, Americans seem barely to have noticed. Maybe it should be some grim comfort that it’s all coming to a head faster than any of us might have thought. Soon, we all may be forced to pay attention, whether we like it or not.

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DOGE at the IRS

by William Kristol

It’s Presidents’ Day. But because Donald Trump is currently our president, today we have this headline in the Washington Post: “Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS.”

The Post story explains that “Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is seeking access to a heavily guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country.”

What could go wrong?

Well, what hasn’t gone wrong?

As University of Michigan political scientist Don Moynihan writes, “Musk and DOGE are providing a real-time management case study. Unfortunately, all of the lessons are about what not to do.”

After all, last week DOGE fired—with no real review, no notice, and no transition period—one in five of the federal employees who manage our nuclear stockpile. Maybe we don’t need all those employees currently working at the National Nuclear Security Administration? Maybe we need more? Maybe their duties should be reorganized in some way or another?

I don’t know. Neither does DOGE.

So, when experts and the public and Congress reacted negatively to the firings, DOGE scrambled to reinstate the employees. Unfortunately, having canceled their email accounts, DOGE had difficulty getting in touch with the people they’d fired in order to un-fire them.

But at least in this instance the NNSA employees are reinstated, for now. That seems not to be the case at the National Institutes for Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Federal Aviation Administration or the Food and Drug Administration.

But I guess researching diseases and dealing with epidemics and keeping air travel safe and attending to food and drug safety are no big deal to the Trump administration. Not when compared with their deep and overriding objective: to break our government.

As Moynihan explains,

They don’t have a plan to fix what they are breaking because they don’t understand or care about the damage they are doing. Breaking government is the point. . . . It is a fundamental error to believe that DOGE is a government efficiency project. Cutting 1 in 4 federal employees would cut federal government spending by 1%. Cost savings are incidental. DOGE is a political control project. Firing and terrorizing public employees is a means to weakening state regulation of private interests and strengthening a personalist presidency.

We have wreckers in charge of our government.

What’s to be done? The courts can help. The media can help. Civil servants can help, by making clear what is happening, and resisting the onslaught as best they can. Even a little malicious compliance wouldn’t hurt.

But there is also something called Congress.

Yes, it’s now (narrowly) controlled by Republicans. And it’s very unfortunate that party loyalty has come to trump institutional responsibility.

Still there is a substantial minority party. They’re called the Democratic party. Remember them?

Is it too much to ask that they at least sound the alarm? Loudly and clearly and repeatedly?

They could start today. With the IRS.

Apparently, what’s going to happen at the IRS is still unresolved. According to the Post, “Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is considering a memorandum of understanding that would give officials from DOGE broad access to tax-agency systems, property and datasets”—but the memorandum hasn’t yet been signed. DOGE has not yet “been granted access as of Sunday evening.”

Senators voted a few weeks ago to confirm Scott Bessent as secretary of the treasury, of which the IRS is a part. The vote was 68 to 29, with 16 Democrats in favor. In his hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Bessent assured senators that he would resist abuse of the IRS. Perhaps senators might speak up? And some House members as well? Some senators and representatives sit on subcommittees responsible for IRS oversight. Maybe they could interrupt their holiday to weigh in?

And perhaps the more than 70 million Americans who voted for House Democrats last November should let Democratic elected officials know they expect them to show some conviction and vigor at this fraught moment? Perhaps they should call the offices of their senators and House members, and ask—needless to say, politely and with all due respect—WHERE, OH WHERE, ARE YOU?

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Quick Hits

LITTLE MARCO FOREVER: When Trump tapped Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state, some Democrats were pleased. Here, at least, was a human being they could work with, someone with developed foreign policy views—in a sea of Robert F. Kennedy Jrs. and Kash Patels, they even dared hope he might be something resembling an adult in the room.

How’s that going so far? “It’s becoming increasingly clear that Marco Rubio is secretary of State in name only,” Nahal Toosi writes this morning for Politico:

Since taking over Foggy Bottom, Rubio has constantly appeared one or two steps behind the actions of President Donald Trump and tech mogul Elon Musk—popping up to explain, justify or even double down on choices he would probably not make if he was actually running the show. He’s talking (and posting online) in a different voice, contradicting earlier policy views and appears to have little control over the implementation of Trump’s assault on the federal workforce.

You’ve got to hand it to Rubio. He watched his vision for a revamped Republican party go up in smoke in 2016 when Trump annihilated him in the GOP primary, but he clawed his way slowly back into his new party leader’s good graces. As a reward, now he gets to be Little Marco forever—or at least until Trump gets tired of him and kicks him to the curb.

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WITH ALLIES LIKE THESE: Worried about Trump’s phone call with Putin, Hegseth’s speech in Brussels, and Vance’s address in Munich? You’re probably not worried enough!

Luckily, Bill is. He recorded a video with Sarah on Friday about Vice President Vance’s embarrassing speech to the Munich Security Conference last week. In case you missed it, Vance attacked America’s allies, cozied up to Europe’s authoritarians, and completely ignored Russia.

Bill also talked to Eric Edelman, former under secretary of defense and ambassador to Turkey and Finland, who now co-hosts The Bulwark’s podcast Shield of the Republic, to really get into the weeds. The bottom line is this: Putin is great at manipulating people, and he’s got Trump doing exactly what he wants. Bulwark+ members can watch the video here. (Free version here.)

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Cheap Shots

1. As anyone with non-fascist, non-dictator-curious concerns about illegal immigration could have spent the last few years telling you, what the system needs is many more immigration judges. Our current massive immigration case backlog means that years can pass between an asylum-seeker’s entry and adjudication of the credibility of his asylum claim, a state of affairs that encourages spurious asylum-seeking. Not such a problem if you’re just planning to ignore the relevant laws and deport people hand over fist.